In the chill of a massive cave beneath an orthodox Christian cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a city power firm is preparing what it thinks will be the greenest data center on the planet.
Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki's most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channeled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.
"It is perfectly feasible that a quite considerable proportion of the heating in the capital city could be produced from thermal energy generated by computer halls," said Juha Sipila, project manager at Helsingin Energia.
Beneath Helsinki's Uspenski Cathedral a new data center is being built whose heat will help warm homes in the Finnish capital.
(Credit: Jrielaecher/Wikimedia Commons)Finland and other north European countries are using their water-powered networks as a conduit for renewable energy sources: capturing waste to heat the water that is pumped through the system.
Due online in January, the new data center for local information technology services firm Academica is one way of addressing environmental concerns around the rise of the Internet as a central repository for the world's data and processing--known as "cloud computing."
Companies seeking large-scale, long-term cuts in information technology spending are concentrating on data centers, which account for up to 30 percent of many corporations' energy bills.
Data centers such as those run by Google already use around 1 percent of the world's energy, and their demand for power is rising fast with the trend to outsource computing.
One major problem is that in a typical data center only 40-45 percent of energy use is for the actual computing--the rest is used mostly for cooling down the servers.
"It is a pressing issue for IT vendors since the rise in energy costs to power and cool servers is estimated to be outpacing the demand for servers," said Steven Nathasingh, chief executive of research firm Vaxa.
"But IT companies cannot solve the challenge by themselves and must create new partnerships with experts in energy management like the utility companies and others," he said.
Data centers' emissions of carbon dioxide have been running at around one-third of those of airlines, but are growing 10 percent a year and now approach levels of entire countries such as Argentina or the Netherlands.
Energy savings
Besides providing heat to homes in the Finnish capital, the new Uspenski computer hall will use half the energy of a typical data center, Sipila said.
Its input into the district heating network will be comparable to one large wind turbine, or enough to heat 500 large private houses.
"Green is a great sales point, but equally important are cost savings," said Pietari Paivanen, sales head at Academica: the center, when expanded as planned, will trim 375,000 euros ($561,000) a year from the company's annual power bill. Academica's revenue in 2008 was 15 million euros.
"It's a win-win thing. We are offering the client cheap cooling as we can use the excess heat," Sipila said.
The center's location in the bowels of the cathedral has an added bonus: security. It is taking over a former bomb shelter carved into the rock by the fire brigade in World War II as a refuge for city officials from Russian air raids.
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OpSource is hosting a very timely conference in San Francisco this week on software-as-a-service. What with the meltdown in the economy and continuing concern about the cost and environmental impact of energy use, there's interest in how cloud computing will impact the IT world.
And what better way to cut through the hype over the so-called green aspects of SaaS than to assemble veteran technologists who might share their experiences with the uninitiated? That's the usual format: People ready to impart knowledge to people eager to receive knowledge.
(Credit:
CNET News)
Good idea but, well, maybe another day.
As I sat in a cavernous ballroom in San Francisco's Westin St. Francis Hotel scribbling down notes, it dawned on me that I was one of, literally, a handful of people listening to the lecturer. At most, there were 10 or 15 of us--a pity because as he faced a sea of mostly empty seats, Randy Bias, a technology strategist for GoGrid, a supplier of cloud computing infrastructure, offered up a convincing brief on the energy-saving advantages of virtualization and why it makes sense to offload server functions to the cloud.
He was followed on stage by Adrian Bowles, a director at Datamonitor, who was equally eloquent about why there are compelling business reasons to rip up the procedures of hardware provisioning that IT followed until the recession (some call it a depression) hit. "The old days of 'buy it, plug it in, and run it' are probably gone forever," Bowles said, proceeding to lay out a hard-headed case on behalf of going green.
By then, I counted eight people--eight--in the ballroom (not including the speaker). Most of the folks attending this two-day kaffeeklatsch couldn't be bothered with a topic that obviously bored them silly. No matter that green tech at its most basic is technology done with a low environmental impact. For some reason, a discussion of low-energy technologies, virtualization, and improved cooling techniques weren't enough to hook them.
As they used to say back in my Brooklyn neighborhood, whaddya gonna do? But truth be told, I was puzzled by all the no-shows. It wasn't as if the other sessions being held at the same time--"SaaS marketing in a downturn" and "Architecting and delivery for SaaS success"--were so much more thrilling.
Could it be that "green" remains too squishy a concept for most of these red-blooded show-me-the-money types? I buttonholed one attendee in a hallway, who agreed as he was munching down a free ice cream provided by the show's sponsors. But the proverbial man on the street interview doesn't suffice.
I heard it said at one of the sessions how IT compensation plans now hinge on how successful you are doing projects faster and doing them more inexpensively. That's why SaaS advocates believe their timing couldn't be any better. Maybe that's misplaced optimism; we'll see as the year progresses.
But this much is clear: telling the boss that you're saving the environment in the process is not likely to be the clincher. Ever.
Harvard University and IBM have launched a project to harness the computing muscle of thousands of computers to discover cheap solar energy materials.
The initiative, announced Monday, is part of the IBM-sponsored World Community Grid, which seeks to speed up research on humanitarian challenges with a grid of connected computers.
The idea is that people and organizations donate computing time to these efforts. A grid server doles out tasks to disparate machines to speed up computational jobs.
IBM also said that it will test running the grid software on an internal compute cloud to tap idle time.
Existing World Community Grid projects are aimed at developing a more nutritious rice as well as conducting cancer and AIDS research. The Harvard project wants to test the chemical properties of a number of organic materials with the aim of determining which are most promising for use as solar cells.
An example of organic solar cells. Konarka makes the plastic cells in a roll-to-roll printing process. Because they are flexible and relatively cheap to make, they can be used in tents, solar chargers, or even clothing.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)The advantage of organic solar cells is that they are much cheaper to manufacture than traditional silicon and are flexible and lightweight. Some kinds can make electricity with a broader spectrum of light, including indoor light.
On the other hand, these cells aren't as efficient at converting light to electricity and they degrade more quickly.
By parsing out the the computing research across several computers, Harvard researcher Alan Aspuru-Guzik said that the project can be completed in 2 years. Using a traditional supercomputer cluster to run the analysis would take 22 years.
"It would take us about 100 days of computational time to screen each of the thousands of compounds for electronic properties without the power of World Community Grid," he said in a statement.
The World Community Grid is tailored to public and nonprofit organizations but IBM has a number of projects in solar and the energy business.
Its commercial research group has three solar-related programs, including the development of thin-film solar cells from CIGS (a combination of copper, indium, gallium, and selenide) and technology to manufacture solar concentrators.
IBM is also very active in developing smart grid software and services for electric utilities.
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Revamping existing data centers can achieve energy efficiency close to those built from scratch to be greener, according to an early report Thursday from Accenture, which analyzed results of case studies backed by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group.
The energy savings explored, if widespread, could prevent the release of carbon dioxide equivalent to taking 8 million cars off the road, researchers said.
Data center energy use could double by 2011, amounting to $7.4 billion in U.S. electricity costs and requiring the equivalent of 10 new power plants, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
"Just because you're not (running) a new data center doesn't mean you can sit back," said Teresa Tung, senior researcher at Accenture Technology Labs, which pooled results of studies in which Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and tech heavyweights including Yahoo, Sun, and Oracle collaborated.
Online activity may exist in the cloud, but for each e-mail sent or movie downloaded, a "little puff of carbon" is emitted somewhere on the back-end, as Sun vice president of engineering Subodh Bapat has described.
Projected growth in IT power consumption outpaces that of any other industry, noted Ray Pfeifer, chair of data center efficiency for the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, which organized a summit at Sun's headquarters, where study results were presented.
Many tech leaders fear the sector will suffer from rising energy costs and anticipated California caps on carbon emissions.
Some consider their data center details to be trade secrets, but more are opening up to each other to try to reduce the industry's carbon footprint. Case in point, some say, are the collaborative demonstration projects, which put into practice recommendations on data center efficiency (PDF) presented to Congress in 2007 by the EPA.
New data centers using the suggested technologies could achieve 79 percent infrastructure efficiency, according to Tung of Accenture. Older data centers applying the tweaks weren't far behind at 74 percent efficiency.
A holistic approach to IT transformation can reduce the electrical use of data centers better than individual site improvements, Tung added.
Useful systems included airflow management with variable fan drives and water side economizers. In addition to promoting consolidation and virtualization, researchers underscored the importance of better managing virtual environments.
Standards are needed to improve security and optimize the virtual environment, said David Thompson, chief information officer at Symantec, which he said saved $40 million through consolidating data centers last year.
Sun Microsystems has reduced its number of data centers from a dozen five years ago to seven today, said chief information officer Bob Worrall, adding that he'd like that to drop to three data centers in the next several years.
"People are saying there are five fuels: coal, nuclear, gas, and oil," said PK Agarwal, chief technology officer for the state of California. "But efficiency is the fifth fuel."
The full report of the data center demonstration projects' results is set to become available July 11.
Other data center hosts for the case studies were Symantec, NetApp, Synopsys, the U.S. Post Office, and Digital Realty Trust. Also participating in the research were SynapSense, APC, Cassatt, IBM, Liebert, Modius, Power Assure, PowerSmiths, Rittal, SprayCool, the California Energy Commisison, and PG&E.
Satellites flying in this formation can analyze the chemicals in and behaviors of clouds close to Earth.
(Credit: NASA)New methods of using satellites to examine clouds are helping scientists to understand how pollution influences rainfall.
Researchers from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have used a group of satellites known as the Afternoon Constellation, or A-Train, to peer into the chemical composition and behaviors of clouds.
"Typically, it is very hard to get a sense of how important the effect of pollution on clouds is," Anne Douglass, deputy project scientist for NASA's Aura satellite, said in a statement. "With the A-Train, we can see the clouds every day and we're getting confirmation on a global scale that we have an issue here."
Until recently, scientists generally have paid less attention to clouds than to views of Earth, which the clouds can block.
Five satellites orbiting 8 minutes apart were able to make almost simultaneous observations. Each satellite played a different role, such as looking at carbon monoxide levels, rainfall patterns, or the size of particles of ice in clouds.
The presence of carbon monoxide in clouds indicates aerosols and smoke coming from land-bound pollution sources including power plants and forest fires.
Polluted South American clouds made less rain than cleaner clouds, according to work by scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. Ice was found to be smaller in clouds laced with aerosol, preventing rainfall during the parched season between June and October.
However, for reasons that remain unclear, rainy seasons in South America and South Asia appeared to be less influenced by aerosol levels in clouds.
The five satellites used are Aqua, Aura, CloudSat and CALIPSO from NASA, and France's PARASOL.
Findings were presented at the Joint Assembly of the American Geophysical Union in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
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